Richard G doing a demo. Photo by Martell Stepney
Breaking stops you. Whether you are headed to meet your new boss or rendezvous with your lover, if you see somebody on a side street brave enough and crazy enough to spin on his head, strong enough to rotate his entire body on one hand, graceful enough to kick and step in a blur of speed and freeze on a dime—you will stop. And now the entire Summer Olympics audience will stop. Sure, this is a bid, transparent as glass noodles, to grab a younger audience and infuse fun and cool into an ancient ceremony. But any movement that requires that much disciplined practice and exhibits that much showmanship is more than a ploy.
Breaking belongs in the Olympics, I decide—I, who am clueless, White, and old, and who ooh and applaud without even knowing the difference between toprock and downrock. I had best ask Richard Grzelka what he thinks. Richard G., his dance name, has been breaking for twenty-two years. He has taught, won national awards, battled in big cities across the country; you might have seen him on the World of Dance website or on a billboard in Times Square.
“It’s exciting,” he says, “but there’s also an air of what took them so long. Compared to, say, gymnastics? There’s the same level of athleticism and work. It’s definitely on par.” What finally elevated breaking, he thinks, was its international popularity. “I don’t think it was as attractive when it was just U.S.-based. But then it got huge in India, Japan, China, Europe. It’s almost bigger internationally than it is here. Breaking events fill stadiums! And for bboys who compete, there’s a lot more sponsorship potential internationally.”
One more American original, like jazz, has found its most enthusiastic audience elsewhere. When I ask why, Grzelka says something vague and polite about history and hip hop and the infrastructure of the country not being in alignment. I ask if the real problem is racism. He murmurs, “That falls in line with what I was saying about the history.” He pauses. “Twenty-five years ago, if you were doing it on a streetcorner, you could get arrested. The perception is what was skewed. A crew would be perceived as a gang, and the battling, the overactiveness, would be perceived as violent.” Street battles could get…tense, he concedes. But they were an alternative to gang violence.
After forty years of reinvestment, evolution, and refinement—all of it a self-contained self-preservation cut off from the mainstream—breaking has emerged as a fully formed sport and dance form. Until now, “everything that was coming from the culture was of the culture,” Grzelka says. Born in the Bronx, hand-in-hand with hip hop, breaking was embraced not only by Blacks but by Latino communities and others—the common denominator being poverty.
Maybe that is what made the U.S. nervous? And now I am nervous: will the Olympic inclusion co-opt breaking for the corporate world, now that its coolness has been sanitized? Will the authenticity, that overused but still crucial word, be lost?
“From what I understand, the Olympics did their due diligence in regard to how to actually do this, and how to judge,” Grzelka says. There will still be one-on-one battles—but in the Place de la Concorde, once studded with guillotines. Louis XVI was executed here; so was Marie Antoinette. This is a milder revolution.
“I’d like to think that in qualifying, the ‘little guy’ can have a shot if he’s good enough,” Grzelka says. “That this won’t be dominated by people who have super big sponsors. Let skill be the qualifier.
“There is a blueprint,” he adds. “The Red Bull BC One platform might be the best model.” Years ago, Red Bull started “an Olympics for the bastardized sports. Anything extreme and unconventional that took really hard work and was potentially dangerous, they wanted to create a platform for it.”
If he could whisper to the judges, he would urge them to look for creativity. Foundation refers to the basic steps that tell the history of breaking; they have been passed down from the pioneers. Power moves—the flips, the super spins—dominated for a time. But the stylistic elements that give a person room to be innovative, that is where the creativity lives. So does the musicality, at which which St. Louis bboys (and the handful of bgirls) excel.
I would kill to be able to defy gravity and catch rhythm at once. I ask how it feels.
“If you’re practicing, it’s repetition, bruises and scrapes, sweat and blood. But it’s fulfilling. If I’m dancing and just having fun, I’m not thinking. Come up to a dancer afterward and ask what they did. They will have no idea. Especially in a battle—it’s not like I did it on purpose. That’s why you have to practice. You have to ingrain these things so neatly into your body that the choice becomes almost subconscious.”
Grzelka grew up in “a Michael Jackson household,” his mom and sister both fervent fans. Introduced to breaking in seventh grade, he watched and asked questions and got schooled. “We didn’t have YouTube. I started hunting for training tapes—people in New York or California would make movies teaching the moves. Then the internet progressed, and we had bboy.org, nothing but bboys from all over the world, and people would give breakdowns of how to do steps.” Distance melted: “It’s like a universal language. You don’t need words.”
You do have to follow the rules of combat, though, and they change from city to city. Some places, you can grab an opponent’s shirt or hat; others not. “Just depends on who brought you up, dancewise,” Grzelka remarks. The emphasis varies regionally, too: “St. Louis has always been heavily toprock affluent, big on the dance element. In Chicago and Florida, they have a lot of power, but they may not blow you away with the musicality.”
He explains the elements: toprock, which is the (my silly word) danciest, with footwork playing against the beat. Downrock, which is floor-based and acrobatic, the body supported on anything but two legs. Freezes, “which are punctuation. A freeze can serve as a comma, a period, an exclamation point.” Power moves: “windmills, air flares, crazy physics-bending things humans can do. I still can’t figure some of it out!” He wants to perfect an air flare; also the nineties, which spins a one-handed handstand. “And I think head spins are dope.” He laughs ruefully. “I’ve seen kids do twenty rotations just spinning on their hands. The young—aw, man. These kids are not to be taken lightly.”
If he had to explain breaking to somebody watching the Olympics in a remote mountain village? “I guess I’d say it’s just another subcategory of dance, some of it superphysical with athleticism over the top, and some of it almost spiritual in the practice. I’d probably explain it as a way to explore your imagination—and maybe share it.”
Now, with the world.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
